Mr. Donal Travers:

The Deputy is absolutely right. It is easy to say the world runs on data centres today but the reality is that more and more business is done through them. The centres perform a really important role, whether it involves hosting applications that enable children to learn from home and employees to work remotely, as we saw during Covid, or the livestreaming of a session like this. Many of the applications that IDA Ireland uses, including our customer-relationship platform or our email application, are run from a data centre. Businesses rely on data centres increasingly. Consumers rely on them also, not just for shopping but also for entertainment and streaming content into homes. That often attracts some negative commentary but the reality is that data centres play a fundamental role in life.

From a technology sector perspective, we are lucky to have in Ireland some of the world's leading data centre companies, particularly the major cloud infrastructure providers, for a couple of reasons. First, they anchor their business in Ireland, but they also anchor the businesses that follow them. The software of many of the software companies in Ireland involves a service business. The term "software as a service" means the software is hosted. In many cases, it is hosted on the infrastructure provided by the big hyper-scale companies that have infrastructure here. A data centre is, therefore, not just an anchor but also an attraction for software companies that might wish to locate and scale here.

The point the Deputy made on Ireland being a great location for renewables is absolutely correct. I have heard that from 35 GW to 70 GW of offshore wind energy will be available to Ireland over the next couple of decades. Not only will we be able to provide enough power for our data centres but hopefully we will also be able to export power, in whatever form it might take. The data centres are at the front in bringing renewables onto the grid and in innovating strategies for doing so. Members might have read today that Microsoft has announced deals to bring another 900 MW of renewable energy onto the grid in Ireland. That is close to 20% of Ireland's national grid capacity in today's terms. The capacity will come over several years. Data centres are certainly at the forefront in getting Ireland renewables-ready. They have the means, ingenuity and strategy to develop renewables. All the major data centres here have a strategy to be carbon neutral very soon – Microsoft by 2025 and others in similar timeframes. They certainly have the means and people to enable that to happen.